by Josh Emmons
“They’re Ryan’s.”
“Since when can he afford?”
“Yeah,” Eve said with mock curiosity, “I wonder how much he paid for them.”
“You mean with or without tax.” Skeletor gave a total-gum smile and you swore his skin was going to peel away. “I’d kill for a smoke right now.”
“I can’t break the packing seal. Wait’ll Ryan gets here.”
A concealed-disappointment: “Okay.”
“When’s Derivative playing?”
“Later.”
“Could you be less specific, please?”
“Later or maybe earlier.”
“And to think I used to tell people you weren’t retarded.”
“You’re developing the potential to be a real bitch.”
“I thought I was a cunt already. You said so last week.”
“Whatever. Let’s play dominoes.”
“They put away the set.”
“But it’s not eight yet.”
“Yeah, well, go tell it on the mountain.”
Skeletor leaned back on the park bench that the Fricatash supplied instead of chairs at its tables and surveyed the crowd of sixty Crayola-headed Eureka cool kids of death. No music played and so they stumbled around on their own, borrowing money from each other. The ones not too stoned to converse conversed; the others made sounds in code, using the same low register “ahhhh” to mean I’m-hungry and isn’t-she-hot and I’ve-gotta-sit-down-for-a-minute and when’s-this-gonna-start and I-read-the-news-today-oh-boy. It was the one-note language of infants that some hidden recess of the brain could translate, a sound to represent everything and nothing.
The Fricatash bar was doing brisk coffee business, as this was a northern California establishment catering to minors. The management, a middle-aged Bengali man named Ravi, expected to be visited by the cops at least twice over the course of the evening and hassled and warned about slackening his vigilance against any on-site drinking by his patrons. Nobody was getting away with anything so don’t get any ideas.
Through the crowd stumbled Ryan in his bomber jacket emblazoned on the back with a child’s iron-on koala bear patch. He squeezed in on the bench between Eve and Skeletor and promptly started laughing, hardy har har at first and then the Crack-Up, body spasming around while he bent forward and muffled his screams in his arm, his long periwinkle-blue hair hanging over the edge of the table like a waterfall. Eve and Skeletor scooted away from him.
“Hey, man.” Skeletor placed a hand on Ryan’s shaking shoulder like a priest consoling a distraught parishioner. “Can I bum a pack of cigarettes?”
But Ryan could only give little tug boat toots and shudder. His brain was being tossed around on a trampoline, and when Eve looked at him she saw five hours into the future when he would be jerking through his nightly pantomime of sleep, in a constant cold sweat despite the seventy-degree room temperature. Eve would sleep fitfully for as long as possible, but eventually, at four or five in the morning, scared of the thought of having to get up and go to work at eleven, she’d take one of the prescription sleeping pills they bought from her aunt, and his twitching would get less noticeable, and she’d sink far from the material world until the alarm clock ripped her back into it.
“Tonight, ladies and germs, we have a very big shoe for you,” said a young man with slicked-back hair doing a kind of Catskills Lodge emcee voice, an Ed Sullivan redux. He wore a pea-green thrift store suit that was too tight around the chest and high around the ankles, a Frankenstein fit that he exaggerated by holding his breath and pulling up on his belt. “I see lots of beautiful people and know you’re going to have a beautiful time. So beautiful I can’t stand it. So sunset beautiful I have a beehive in my belly.” He dropped the microphone to his side. Someone from the audience told him he was beautiful. “Could we have a rilly big round of applause for …” he let the words hang in the air, “for …” his eyebrows went up searchingly, “you’re all so beautiful,” and now there was a hush and someone threw a water bottle at him that barely missed, “I love the nightlife baby,” as the spotlight moved up and back, “people, come closer, I won’t bite and neither will,” to an assembled four-person band, “the Sloe Eyes!”
Pandemonium.
When the Sloe Eyes ended their set and left, Eve saw the guitarist for Derivative attach his guitar to an amp at the back of the Fricatash stage while the singer breaststroked in place. She got up from the table and pushed past Ryan, who had stopped laughing and now sat with his shoulders slumped forward on the bench like a boxer after losing a fight.
Eve squirmed through people and made a clearing for herself near the stage, where she waited patiently for the band to begin. Refused a swig from a bottle of soda that had been emptied and filled with gin. Just said no to drugs. Had a brief exchange with her coworker Vikram, there because he’d heard a woman he liked was coming, though she was nowhere to be seen and he was too tired to be bouncing around with kids half his age. Adjusted her bra strap that had somehow gotten flipped over.
Derivative began with its dolphin song, choruses of eeek-yiiiiik, and Eve was put in a bad mood because how can anyone honestly like to listen to such annoying piercing shit? It was the band being perverse and frustrating their fans’ expectations, which Eve admired in theory but hated in practice. She wanted them to frustrate the fans who expected something out of the ordinary like the dolphin song, not her expectation of their brilliant fifty-second threnodies.
The next song was a coy little number about a boy and a girl playing at being animals. And it got graphic real quick. “My birdie flies into your nest oh whoa oh.” Eve loved this song and forgot all about Ryan’s death on the installment plan. And the probability of Bonanza 88 going out of business. She was lost on a planet of sound and saw no reason to try to find her way back. “Try my acorn try my acorn I’ve hidden it just for you.”
Eve stepped backward and forward in time to the music. She jostled bodies and felt around for floor openings in which to put her feet and soon realized that her shirt was clinging wet in back. Nobody should have had time to sweat that badly, so she turned around to see who was responsible for her wetness and saw an old guy, in his fifties at least, dripping in an open-collared shirt. Hair pasted to the side of his head. People had moved away from him, presumably because he’d also gotten them wet, so he was surrounded by a ring of clear space. Eve couldn’t place where she’d seen him before, certainly not at the Fricatash. The man had no business being there. Not that Eve was ageist. Far from. She just didn’t think it was right for soaking wet old guys to thrust themselves into the middle of young people’s fun.
The song ended and the bassist drank an iced coffee and the drummer buried his head in his hands. Eve glanced in Ryan’s direction, saw Skeletor edge a pack of cigarettes out of the carton. A girl she recognized from McDonald’s stepped into her line of sight. Facing forward she saw the old wet guy now directly in front of her, almost stepping on her toes.
“Excuse me,” she said.
The man stepped aside and said, “Could you tell me where we are?” His voice was soft and respectful, not belligerent like the bums his age who’d given up on the niceties and now were just complete assholes. He even looked a little melancholy, appropriate for someone who’d been around a long time.
“The Fricatash. Why are you wet?”
“Is it still December fourth?”
“No,” she laughed, “it’s the tenth,” although once she said it she was unsure. Something was—she’d seen this man before.
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know, nine. Were you just swimming?”
“No. Did you see how I got here? Did someone bring me?”
“Oh hey!” she exclaimed. “You’re the guy who’s missing!”
“I’m Leon Meed,” he said. “I’ve gone missing? You’ve heard this?”
“It was on the news and—”
Eve was pushed forward by a wave of people moving in to hear Derivativ
e’s next song, a gospel number, and in the resulting visual stutter she lost sight of Leon. People in the audience swayed and stomped and did little gyrations. They raised and lowered their hands like revivalists to these frail white boys, to the basso profundo “Our time it gets no righter/ Our load it gets no lighter/ Take me Lord to where the light shines brighter.” And everyone humming the way you do when you can’t contain the beck and call of whatever It is to you.
She looked everywhere and despite the density of people making escape impossible, Leon was gone. Her back was dry. There was nothing to say but amen.
At four thirty a.m., Silas Carlton stopped telling himself that he was asleep. His daily confession. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom and sponge-bathed his face and arms before padding into the living room, where he turned on the television with the hope of finding a local news story about the drowned man at the South Jetty. There was nothing on but a documentary about leukemia that spotlighted three American casualties of the war between good and bad white blood cells: a man, woman, and child whose stoicism never faltered on camera. Silas ate the remains of a ham sandwich he’d left on the coffee table the night before, fell asleep at a quarter past six, and, upon reawakening in an upright position on the recliner, patted his chest for his glasses that had slipped off. Failing to locate them, he muted the TV and stared at his fading reflection in the living-room window. Outside was a pallid gray dawn. He’d never before seen an accidental fatality such as had happened at the beach, someone overpowered by the forces of nature. Despite the frequency with which floods and earthquakes and erupting volcanoes and hurricanes took lives, he’d never—
Suddenly, in the window, instead of his dying reflection Silas saw another man’s face. He rubbed his eyes with one hand and resumed searching for his glasses with the other. The man must have been a visitor—at last someone dropping by to check on him—but Silas couldn’t see his features distinctly, could only generally make out curly hair and a brown shirt or coat. Pointing toward the front door, he said loudly, “It’s open! Come in!” The man didn’t move. “It’s open!”
Silas found his glasses, wedged between the bottom pillow and armrest, and put them on, though because of the poor lighting outside he still couldn’t recognize the man. Was it Beto the Argentinian stopping by to see if he’d like to fly his remote control airplane with him? Or one of his neighbors hoping to borrow a bicycle pump? Silas didn’t understand why the man wasn’t going to the front door, so he moved to get up and let him in, at which point the man disappeared. Silas was halfway out of his chair when he found himself looking through the window at nothing but a lava rock garden, mulberry bushes, mini lawn, street, parked cars, other houses, and wrought-iron sky. No man. He didn’t rush to conclusions, for he was perhaps hypnagogic, his sleepy eyes playing tricks on him. He sat back down to consider things and adjust his glasses as though they were a radio dial that, properly modified, would clearly broadcast what had been garbled.
He waited and waited and sensed nothing but static.
2
In a beige house in the Cutten neighborhood of Eureka, an orthopedic surgeon named Steve Baker entered the music room, where a dark cherry wood piano stood as a four-legged accusation, a sixty-one key universe of potential sound whose silence was the loudest he had ever heard. He sat on the bench in front of it, on lavender varnished cedar dimpled over time by the hard fingernails of hundreds of frustrated eleven-year-olds sitting through thousands of mother-mandated lessons while thinking of millions of other things. He’d fought over this piano, defended his love of it in sotto voce with nothing-could-induce-me-to-give-it-up conviction.
And Anne, his wife, appealing to reason, had pointed out with growing impatience that he never played it, that he’d bought it for their never-conceived child, for the express purpose of her teaching this phantom progeny how to play, because she had studied it all her life, and she loved it and looked forward more than anything to twice-weekly sessions with Wendy, if it was a girl, or William, if it was a boy. She had oiled its strings, tuned it regularly, polished its fine wood grains and lacquered its ivory keys and fluttered around it during the move from Egret Road to Kroeber Lane like a paleontologist transporting a dinosaur egg.
It was absurd not to let her keep it, especially since she’d been so generous toward him with everything else—with the bread maker and the twelve-horsepower rototiller and the waist-high Klipsch speakers—although absurd was exactly what he felt their whole breakup was. Absurd because it was so rational and calculated. Their love? Plus one. His sterility? Minus two. And it was absurd because she insisted on living in a small town (“Any small town, I don’t care. Can’t you see how much choice that gives you? How many options?” she’d asked), and because he couldn’t do little things like stay with her while she finished her breakfast on Sunday mornings—no, he had to retreat to his work study once he was done eating to work on his models, and he wouldn’t acknowledge the symbolic importance of these abandonments—and because they had voted for different candidates in the last mayoral election (“The presidential election, sure, I grant you,” he’d said, shaking the garlic press at her, “that would be enough for you to get angry and say that we’re incompatible. But the Eureka mayor? Who cares?”). The pros and cons of their relationship were weighed, and a gross imbalance was found. Scales didn’t lie. “But scales aren’t the only thing to go by,” he’d said. “Do you really want—because we could adopt and split our time between big and little towns and move toward political consensus in the future—do you really want to let it go just like that?”
Though it wasn’t just like that. She pointed out that he’d conspicuously not mentioned the issue on which he was solely to blame and which most upset her, his inconsiderateness when she felt alone and needed his company, those times when he’d disappear and say he had to be by himself and that it was chemical and nothing to take personally. But how else could she take it than personally? She wasn’t a machine, no matter how radically our language had upgraded from brain hemispheres to hard drives. And maybe this proved in a way that her love for him was insufficient and had always been insufficient, but that the possibility of raising children in a semirural community overseen by a wise, mutually agreed upon mayor had once been enough to supplement her feelings and make the relationship worth working on. Now, clearly, the situation had been exposed for what it was. She had accepted a job in the town of Willits, two hours south of Eureka—he hadn’t even known she’d been looking—and packed up her things and moved out, leaving Steve with an untouched piano and the feeling that he would soon fade away. This was what he heard in the silence, the sound of his own diminuendo.
He closed the piano lid and pinched the tip of his long aquiline nose. His hair, an auburn brown rusting into gray, dug softly into his neck. His fellow doctor Greg Souza’s suitcase lay open on the couch. Greg was staying with him while initiating divorce proceedings against his schoolteacher wife, Elaine, or maybe Elaine was initiating them against him—Steve didn’t know the details of it and thought only that divorce was spreading like a virus.
He decided to go for a drive, which he did as an offensive against depression more frequently than he cared to admit, occasions on which he’d go anywhere, didn’t matter, so long as he was moving and there was music and lots to look at and to distract him. His depression would be subdued temporarily, and he’d arrive home a few hours later, if not mentally restored then at least closer to being able to go to bed.
Today he drove to Table Bluff, a cliff and beach area five miles south of Eureka and near a recently built Wiyot community housing project, an evolutionary step forward in Indian reservations where the land was governed by the tribe but maintained by the State of California. With independent police and dependent roads. Steve passed it and thought, This is the sort of town where Anne and I could have ended up. Maybe not this particular town, because you have to be Native American to live in it, but somewhere this size where real estate is cheap. I could
have made that concession.
He saw the ocean in the distance at intervals as the road wound up and down hills, with undulating fields of buffalo grass on the left and isolated homesteads and dilapidated barns on the right. Something was wrong. Steve pressed harder on the accelerator and found himself going slower. The fuel light had been shining empty for who knew how long. A gas can in the back? No, damn it. Embankment park and a leg stretch around the car and some self-reproach for not filling up the tank earlier. It wasn’t more than two miles back to the Wiyot housing project, though he didn’t remember seeing a gas station there. Noise up the road and Steve saw a truck round the bend at a dangerous clip and he stood helplessly—or with what he hoped was a posture of helplessness and entreaty—waving a hand for the truck to stop. It was maybe seventy yards from him when he saw, beggaring belief, a man clinging to the gun rack on the truck’s roof. Lying facedown and spread-eagle, holding the edges of the rack for purchase, this man was head forward and Steve thought he heard—yes, without a doubt he caught—him shouting “Stop! Stop! Stop!” Steve hoped that his and the man’s combined request would bring the truck to a halt, though this hope was dashed as the truck raced past him, its driver with the tensed and fearful expression of someone trying to escape the hounds of hell. Then the truck was gone and Steve stared after it. A haze of dust, nothing. He resigned himself to walking and the thought sank in that he’d just witnessed an act of recklessness for which he’d probably be called in to surgery later that day. And something else wasn’t right. Something even less right than the obvious not-rightness of two men barreling down a country road in equal states of panic and unequal states of personal safety. Steve thought he recognized the face of the man on the roof. It was the fleetingest of glimpses, but still.